Xconomists of the Week: Tom Maniatis and Marc Tessier-Lavigne Lead the Charge on the New York Genome Center

Today marked the official launch of the New York Genome Center, a collaboration among 11 top academic institutions that’s designed to accelerate genomic research. The initiative—supported by the City of New York and private and public institutions—is being guided by two of our Xconomists: Rockefeller University’s Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who will serve on the center’s board of directors, and Columbia University’s Tom Maniatis, who will chair its scientific advisory board.

Tessier-Lavigne and Maniatis both spoke at today’s opening event, and emphasized the importance of the center’s mission to foster cooperation between academic institutions that might normally consider themselves to be rivals. Columbia and Rockefeller University are both participating, along with such big-name institutions as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and New York University. Representatives from all the participants began working together to plan the initiative in mid-2010. “If we can maintain this level of team effort, the New York Genome Center will be a huge success,” Maniatis said at the beginning of his remarks today.

The idea behind the Genome Center is for the participating institutions to share discoveries, so scientists can identify the molecular causes of disease and, in so doing, accelerate the development of drugs that can be targeted to specific patient populations. It will include … Next Page »